In full swing

Kick arse. Kick arse. Those are the only ways to describe the Ubuntu Developer Summit. Here we are in Seville having a blast and getting some really productive work done. I have actually been here since Wednesday for the Ubuntu Education Summit and the Ubucon, and everything has been running smoothly.

The Ubuntu Education Summit was a great success, filled with some great talks. Of particular interest was the training talk from Billy and Frank, the Intel talks and the mEDUxa talk. Lots of enthusiasm all round. Well done to Richard for his efforts with the UES.

The Ubucon went stunningly well. About 60 – 100 people showed up, and everything ran very smoothly. Thanks to Sladen, Melissa, the local team and the GuadaLinex people for all their hard work. Also, thanks to everyone who spoke at the event and otherwise participated. It was a great example of an Ubucon in action. I hope this becomes a regular event – if only to get me over to Seville again. 😛

The UDS has been going very well, lots of enthusiasm and vigour, and a stack of excellent, productive sessions. So, my little underlings, prepare for a bullet-point orgy to cover some of the community sessions:

The slightly-controversial planet incident was discussed and the planet content removal policy and the complaints procedure was defined. The session was very productive and helped structure what happens in the future. It is a pretty damn rare risk however, and I doubt we will have a similar incident crop up anytime soon.

Some discussion about how forums users can contribute to the development process has thrown up ideas and plans for encouraging forums users to get their ideas into a format and medium that is compatible with the Ubuntu development process. This is great work, and I am looking forward to working with the forums community to help them hook in with the development process better. 🙂

We clarified some issues with LoCo resources and I am looking into the possibility of setting up a resources team to help deal with list requests, DNS changes and other issues. There is a bottleneck right now, and it needs fixing. I am sure we will have further discussions about this later in the week.

The subject of mentoring has appeared this week, and I know LaserJock is keen to encourage mentoring in MOTU and I have been in discussions with Adam about creating a team-agnostic mentoring structure that can act as a baseline for all team-specific mentoring initiatives.

Discussion of bartering techniques for encouraging further contributing – such as “if you want me to add this feature, go and triage 50 bugs”. I think done right, this could work, but it needs to be team-specific and be an optional process available. Henrik suggested this, and he has it laid out pretty well in his mind.

Discussions at the UES about creating an education coalition. This will be a pilot scheme to bring together educational enthusiasts from inside the LoCo community and see how we can make some incredible things happen. If this works well, and I suspect it will, it could open up many doors for other coalitions of enthusiasts in our amazing LoCo community. Speaking of which, the LoCo community is frikken incredible. I am so proud of everyone who is part of it. I should get stickers made like when you have a tooth out at the dentist…they could say “I rock the LoCo world”.

OK, now I need to clarify a few things to set the rumour mill back to Standby:

I am still not interested in ducks the way some people may suggest.

No, the scar on my arm is not from some kind of suicide attempt, and yes, it is from trying to climb an orange tree while under the influence.

Dennis Kaarsemaker is indeed the bastard child of Scott James Remnant and James Troup.

I don’t have the plague that has affected the UDS. The source of the plague is Robert Collins – he has been taken to a hazmat containment chamber and hosed down.

Corey Burger funded his trip here with the proceeds of his David Duchovny Lookalike Roadshow in Canada.

Seville is beautiful, and a great place to be. Everyone has been stunningly friendly, and our GuadaLinex friends have been incredibly accommodating. Thanks to everyone involved.

More as I get it. Well, more as I get a chance to grab five minutes and blog it… 🙂